Tag Archives: Oxford University science web-site

The statistics for Oxford University’s animal research in 2018 have now been made public on the University’s web-site. Here is VERO’s summary, showing the numbers for each species (with 2017 for comparison), and then the severity of the ‘procedures’ involved. A few comments follow the two tables.

Total number of experimental procedures, by species:

Species

Number in 2017

Number in 2018

Mice

229,640

208,057

Fishes

3,852

8002

Rats

2,599

2,913

Junglefowl

21

291

Frogs

155

89

Guinea Pigs

80

81

Badgers

39

64

Pigs

5

20

Ferrets

29

24

Non-Human Primates

7

10

Rabbits

2

0

Total:

236,429

219,551

Severity of procedures (for those species where moderate or above was recorded):

Species

Severe

Moderate

Mild

Sub-threshold

Non-recovery

Mice

1,889

35,903

49,730

117,743

2,792

Fishes

298

1,236

5,127

1,211

130

Rats

37

622

427

1,150

677

Ferrets

0

9

0

0

15

Non-Human Primates

0

9

1

0

0

The total number: 219,551 represents a fall of just over 7% on last year’s total. This is welcome, of course, but unfortunately it can’t be taken as part of a trend. Last year’s number had shown a rise of 8.5% on 2016. Like the value of investments (and one might pursue other similarities), these numbers may go down as well as up, but the clear trend since the completion of the new laboratory has been upward. The number for 2007, which was the last complete year before the laboratory opened for business, was 155,901.

Animals killed without experiments: No number has yet been published for these animals in 2018. Perhaps it won’t ever be given, since a number was provided for 2017 last year, and for some reason the law only requires such animals to be counted in every fifth year. But it’s a very important number, and ought always to be included in the returns. That’s partly because the number is to some extent an index to the efficiency of a laboratory, unpleasant as that word ‘efficiency’ is in this context. But also, the need to do and publish this count is a helpful corrective to the assumption, which the 1986 Act otherwise makes and therefore encourages, that killing an animal is not in itself a significant wrong. That assumption has been frequently noticed in other parts of this blog. It’s not one we humans make for ourselves; I can’t think of any sound reason for making it in the case of other animals.

Science or PR: Last year’s commentary in this blog on the annual Oxford numbers included a critical appreciation of the University’s animal-research web-pages, or at least of the main page, which is titled ‘Research Using Animals: an Overview’. Very little on that page has changed since then, except the just-published numbers. However, the sentence which introduces numbers is new, and here it is:

Figures for 2018 show numbers of animals ‘on procedure’, as declared to the Home Office using their five categories for the severity of the procedure.

This short and functional statement manages to fit in two plain errors. The first error is to speak of numbers of animals rather than numbers of ‘procedures’. The statistics submitted to the Home Office, or separately published as here, are always a count-up of procedures and not of animals. True, this makes very little difference in practice (although the two numbers can differ if, for instance, an animal is re-used in a new research project); it may therefore seem a pedantic distinction, especially since neither way of counting really tells us very much, as this blog has often enough shown. But the point is that nobody who has had anything to do with conducting or reporting the research would make such a mistake. When Cruelty Free International rather carelessly made a similar mistake a few years back, Speaking of Research (a scientists’ pressure-group promoting animal research) called it “a rookie mistake for an organisation which claims to be an authority on the issue”. Oxford University surely is an authority on its own research. How then does it let through a mistake like this?

The second error shows a similar confusion. The animals in the count are said to be “on procedure”, a professional-sounding term perhaps borrowed from lower down on the ‘Overview’ page where it refers to non-human primates undergoing brain research. But the term means ‘research unfinished’, whereas the annual count is precisely of completed research. It used once to be a count of proposed and accepted procedures (the change, a sensible one, came in 2014), but it was never a count of procedures under way at time of counting.

Again, it may not seem to matter much, though in this case it would be a very awkward way of doing things. But the confusion in both cases makes clear that these annual numbers are being introduced by someone who knows only the jargon of the subject, and also that nobody with better knowledge is being asked to check what’s written, or cares to do so on their own initiative. In short, it’s simply a PR job, and not a very good one.

Last year’s commentary showed that the whole ‘Overview’ text evidences the same sort of amateur authorship. Presumably we can treat the annual numbers themselves as reliable, but there’s no reason to accept as true or authoritative anything else said on the animal research web-pages. This isn’t university science speaking (or even bothering to have read). We needn’t spend any more time on it ourselves, then.